A color theme is generally a set of several colors that are typically thematically related, but may also be defined as a single color. Color themes can be useful for the design of Web pages, print documents, design schemes, interior decorating, clothing lines, etc. Color themes have grown larger and more extensive over the years. It is not uncommon for a computerized collection of color themes to reach five, ten or even fifty thousand color themes, often left unsorted or uncategorized in the digital version of a junkyard. Current methods of using large collections of color themes often involve the use of tags. Generally, tags provide a highly flexible approach to organizing any kind of content. In the color theme context, tags, often a set of one or more words, are typically used to describe the look and feel of a color theme, the purpose of a color theme, or for other descriptive purposes, but may be arbitrarily assigned. For example, a color theme for a child's playroom might be tagged with “playful,” “cheerful,” or perhaps “Mary,” if that is the child's name, to describe the purpose or content of the color theme. Tags may be metadata and can take other forms aside from keywords. Various tags are supported by Adobe® products Photoshop®, Illustrator®, Creative Suite®, Kuler™ and others.
The present version of Kuler™ (http://kuler.adobe.com/), an on-line application helps designers, such as interior decorators, Web page architects, document planners, or even ordinary consumers, choose, create, and share color themes on-line with others, and search for various color themes with associated tags. Kuler™ users can create a color theme for a new home office and associate the color theme with one or more tags, such as “cozy,” “rebirth,” etc. and then search for that color theme and other available color themes tagged with those exact tags (keywords).
Browsing through color theme collections becomes more difficult as the collection grows. Additionally, current color theme collection applications typically do not allow users to simply search for similar color themes based on an inputted or selected color theme. Present applications also fail to adequately facilitate consistent and relevant tagging of color themes. Generally, users are forced to manually browse through a color theme collection or use exact tag-based searching to view the tags used by others for related color themes.